It’s been nearly seven months since the talented (and twisted) team at Straandlooper Animation released the third and final act of their brilliantly irreverent Hector adventure game trilogy.
So what have they been up to? What’s next?
As you may have noticed, recently Kevin Beimers (one half of Straandlooper’s Hector team) has been stopping by our site about once a month to regale you with his witty brand sarcasm, but otherwise this Northern Ireland indie Animation and game development team has been fairly quiet regarding their next ventures.
Well, I’m happy to report that the folks at Straandlooper have been hard at work, and are at the very early stages of development on three ideas for new puzzle/adventure style games and a couple of short films as well. Again, these are still in the early stages of development, and are currently funded by a Slate Development loan from Northern Ireland Screen which matched Straandlooper’s own funding. Straandlooper plans to produce and publish the games for iPad, iPhone, iPod, PC and Mac, and is currently seeking the funds to scale up for full production.
Dean Burke and Kevin Beimers, (the team behind the Hector games) are at work on two new properties, each of which is an original idea by either Burke (Thunder in Donford) or Beimers (Schrödinger’s Cat). As for the third title, The Sirrush Conundrum, it is being developed by Straandlooper’s founders Alastair McIlwain and Richard Morss, and is an original idea by Morss.
Unfortunately we don’t have much to show you in the way of screenshots for any of these tiles, since they are so early in development process. However we do have some fairly detailed descriptions of each title, so without further ado, here are the games:
Schrödinger’s Cat
Creator: Kevin Beimers
Schrödinger’s Cat is part puzzler, part platformer, part punch-up – stars a dark, dimension-jumping feline superhero who’s both dead and alive, unwittingly charged with disentangling the secrets of time, space, the atomic, the astronomical and the infinite. Up against anything from an unruly band of disagreeable leptons to the sinister creeping tendrils of Dark Matter, Schrödinger’s Cat is sure to blow the lid off all the things you never knew about life, the universe and everything.
The idea for the game is something that Beimers says has been “boiling away in Beimers’ brain for about 10 years” so it is bound to be brilliant.
Thunder in Donford
Creator: Dean Burke
Like the Hector games, Thunder in Donford is packed with preposterous point- &-click style irreverence. A boisterous, non-stop cross-country ricochet across Britain, slapped together with the meticulous delusions of a paranoid conspiracy theorist lorry driver, Trev Duvay. Part time trucker, full time loner on an unforgettable crazy road trip that will probably scar your fragile mind for life.
The Sirrush Conundrum
Creator: Richard Morss
An epic puzzler delving into the hidden worlds of espionage and the dark underside of global business’ relations with governments. Accompany outspoken politico and ‘toff’ dissident James Newton Wellbeloved aka Newt as he runsfrom a kill order and at the same time has to unravel and foil a labyrinthine and outrageous international plot that leads him into the far reaches of alternative archaeology and – for a lifelong skeptic- a mind blowing immersion in so-called ‘psychic’ techniques.
Having been a BIG fan of the Hector series, I am super excited to see some possible new games from Straandlooper, they all sound like great projects. Hopefully the team can secure the necessary funding to make one or more of these games happen in the next year or so.
